


Violent Love, Marble Skin

by Coldest_Fire



Category: House of Night - P. C. Cast & Kristin Cast
Genre: Character Study, F/F, I Made Myself Cry, Neferet starts to learn that other people have trauma too, References to Child Abuse, She isn't alone--neither is, Two emotionally compromised lovers defining love, references to past abuse, set after the stone skipping scene in Forgotten, they have too much trauma in common Okay, warrior's oath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:54:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27592349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coldest_Fire/pseuds/Coldest_Fire
Summary: After skipping stones with her, Neferet has an epiphany about the ways she and Lynette are the same, and just how much she means to her.“I don’t know what it is to love, or to be loved. Neither of us could. I won’t fill the silence with words neither of us has the means to understand,” which sounded almost like an apology, that there was a word she could not offer her. “ Instead, I know what it is to be safe, and to be protected. I knew what I’ve given up to become what I am,” she hesitated again, thinking of the solitude, the fear and the sacrifice. Of what it was like to seek out safety in power when she was not safe inside her own head.“I will protect you as I’ve protected myself all these years,”
Relationships: Neferet (House of Night)/Lynette Witherspoon
Kudos: 2





	1. Violent Love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this piece was speed-written becasue I reread part of forgotten to figure out where Lynette's backstory was going to be at when I intro her in Glass Memories, and it Hit. Did anyone else remember that Neferet cried? Or that she went pale? Or how quickly she was willing to talk about things that she doesn't talk about for more than a century? 
> 
> In the ebook, that was 3-4 pages. It happened so fast, but it was the first moment I actually thought the authors would give Neferet any kind of redemption. She was human there. 
> 
> So in this piece, I deal with what she was feeling, hearing about all that, that made her cry. And what she wants to do about it. I also deal with love and violence, and most importantly, Neferet finding out all at once that she cares for another person's safety as much as her own. I know they imprint in found, but I wanted to play with a different kind of bond. 
> 
> Next chapter will be Lynette's POV.

Lynette was asleep. She’d fallen asleep in Neferet’s bed, in some mutual understanding—neither wanted to be alone. Though Lynette was asleep, Neferet still hadn’t found rest. She instead looked down at Lynette. She’d kept one small stone. Too small to skip, but similarly shaped. She turned it over in her fingers, which had long since memorized its profile. Lynette thought she looked young, carefree, something neither of them had ever had.

Her whole body felt too hot, almost to the point of trembling, and her teeth and fingers clenched. She hadn’t felt her anger this deeply in her body since the night she killed him. Her hands had never quite forgotten the feeling of the necklace cutting into Arthur’s throat when they clenched. She wanted blood. She wanted to find every man who’d ever touched Lynette, and to kill them, not with Darkness, but with her own hands. She wanted to make her mother watch them all go first, and tell her at the start that she ought to thank her for bringing her, after all, _this shit’s her future._

Protection and violence were sides of a coin. To protect herself, she’d killed, and sacrificed, and shed more blood than could be justifiable for anyone short of divine. She was under no delusions of what it was she’d done. She’d waged a crusade in her own name. To protect Lynette, she realized, she’d go as far. She’d hardly heard the first few words when the urge seized her. She wanted not to use Darkness, but to kill them with her own hands. To feel the life leave their bodies, deludes of crimson and pleas. Lynette was _ten_. There was nothing she could do to them that came close to what they’d done, but she’d come damned close. Her only hesitation was that it would do little for Lynette, to see her abusers lined up in a row. Perhaps it would even be worse.

Lynette was too much like her, she’d built herself atop the wreckage. Exhuming the past now shook the foundations of everything she’d become. She’d gotten so far, on so little. No one had stood by her, a kind of solitude that could consume a person, Neferet knew all too well. Neferet wasn’t sure even she would have survived Lynette’s life. It felt strange, being one step away from godhood, and wondering if the sleeping human woman in her bed was stronger than she’d ever had to be. What was certain was that her strength was tested again and again. At least it was over for Neferet when the worst of it was. The money she’d inherited when Arthur’s windpipe and her father’s liver had caught up to them, and her affinities had set her up nicely. All the things that had ensures her escape had held Lynette under.

She didn’t know what it took for Lynette to survive the years in her mother’s house, the marriages, the attempts at rebuilding. Her Lynette was tenacious—she knew what it took to survive. Perhaps, initially, that was why she followed Neferet to this place. “You’re so strong,” she barely whispered, brushing a lock of her blonde hair off her face. She wanted to take that weight off of her. Having strength shouldn’t force her to use it all the time.

It wasn’t the urge to violence that bothered her about this whole situation. She had no objections to doing violence to men like that, nor to protecting a loyal follower who would help her achieve divinity. What got under skin she was sure she’d turned to stone was how _personal_ this all was. Hearing Lynette’s story drained the breath from her lungs and the blood from her skin. She’d felt for a moment as though everything inflicted on Lynette was hers. Fury was palatable, but the _hurt_ she’d felt with her, through her…

She’d told her everything. She hadn’t spoken of her past since she’d sealed that chapter in Arthur’s blood. It wasn’t the same life: that was Emily, and she was Neferet. Walls that had held for more than a century, had kept even her out of her last life were besieged, because she _understood_. She knew what it was to be given to a monster by her only family. Treated as a thing and a bargaining chip.

It hung over her, hung over both of them. A grief with an unspeakable name for what their lives _would have been_. No amount of blood could get that back. Even divinity couldn’t buy back her past, only her future. It was more odious for Lynette, never certain of the future either. All those years ago, her mother had told her to be thankful for the abuse, _this shit’s your future._ Had she ever felt, with any certainty, that it wasn’t anymore? Neferet knew better than to think she was any different, any less threatening than the family and the marriages that had been written out of her future, to try to change the ending.

Lynette was shown that keeping her place somewhere meant suffering. Neferet didn’t know, nor want to know what she expected to stay here. They were too much the same.

“My darling,” she whispered, “my dearest.” Her voice was so loud within her head, but scarcely a whisper aloud. She wouldn’t wake her. “All your life, you’ve been treated as less than you are. As currency for a woman who should have protected you. As an object to the people she tried to keep. As a prop to your husbands. Every person in your life has made you more alone. In solitude, you built yourself, time and time again,” she whispered, “you are like me, but your strength has been tested so much more, to reach so much less.”

She felt the gravity of her next words: a vow and not a wish. She spoke slowly, ensuring she meant every word of it. “You will not be alone any longer,” she began, “nor a pawn in my quest, nor an object subject to my will or the violence of disobeying it.” In truth, the thought of anything hurting Lynette—let alone her doing it—made her sick.

“I am not a lover,” she confessed, “I don’t know what it is to love, or to be loved. Neither of us could. I won’t fill the silence with words neither of us has the means to understand,” which sounded almost like an apology, that there was a word she could not offer her. “ Instead, I know what it is to be safe, and to be protected. I knew what I’ve given up to become what I am,” she hesitated again, thinking of the solitude, the fear and the sacrifice. Of what it was like to seek out safety in power when she was not safe inside her own head.

“I will protect you as I’ve protected myself all these years,” she vowed, “I will support you, I will see that everything you’ve rebuilt does not ever again collapse beneath you. I will catch you when you fall, and I will stand beside you when you rise. I will share my immortal life with you as long as you live.”

There was something missing. Something she only skirted around, “I’ll prove to you that that was never to be your future,” she vowed, and it wasn’t enough, “you don’t have to be hurt to not be alone. You can be treasured, heard…” she almost said it then. The word had a way of skirting her will.

She reminded herself, “I do not know what it is to love, and to be loved. All I have is what I am, and what I’ve made myself. But I have it in me to be devoted, as you’ve been to me. I have it in me to be relentless against those who intend you harm. If it _is_ love, to protect another as zealously as I’ve fought all these years for myself, then-”

She broke off, feeling she was at a precipice, and her next words would either bridge into somewhere uncharted, or into the abyss. It took more courage to speak than it did to wage a war. “Then I offer you a warrior’s zealous, bloody, violent love.A goddess’ devoted, shielding, protective love. And I offer what healing either of those can be, by scorched earth or tended wounds. I offer the love only someone so like you could feel, and a future that is not bound to the past.” She was almost lightheaded from hearing herself, but there was only a little left to say, and she was strong enough. “This is my oath.”

Lynette did not wake, but Neferet felt something within her. The easiest comparison would be to the purple candle: spirit. The flood of emotion. The feeling of being the flame on the candle, banishing the shapes and the shadow on her periphery. She felt every bit the sword and shield. Perhaps, this feeling that flooded her was love.

If it was this to love, it was bittersweet. Her life until this moment felt as separate from this as it did her last life. It was power without the precipice of failure, sex without the contradictory physical closeness and emotional distance, life giving blood if it was potent enough to wake the dead. She felt she was already the goddess she was set to become.

_She accepts your vow._


	2. Marble Skin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I swore there was going to be 2 chapters and that was it, but it's going to have a short Epilogue that deals with what this oath is, and how it happens... spoiler is right there in the tags, but anyway. 
> 
> How a High priestess swore herself in as a warrior to a human woman, guess we'll see. 
> 
> Anyway, I wrote the first two chapters in 2 hours in the dead of night, and just finished editing, so yeah. Here's Lynette too. 
> 
> The idea of marble came form a lyric: "you admit that you're lonely,/you're as cold as a statue/pleading fuck me on the marble that was used to create you." Not the same vibe at all, but that image was so beautiful that I had to steal it.

The last thing Lynette had expected was to feel somehow okay when she woke up. Any time she had to think of her past, she found herself drained, demoralized, and having to make mental lists of the things that she’d done to get herself away from who she was then. From that future. Was it Neferet beside her that made this different? Was it magic? Was it some sort of physical distance?

After yesterday, she knew Neferet well enough she thought she could even ask her if she could join her in this bed more often, though she could see why Neferet probably liked to sleep alone. She had to wonder why she didn’t want to. Neferet was powerful, enough so that she could eviscerate her without even having to move. She’d watched her kill two people already. Somehow, she didn’t feel the same trepidation she’d felt even yesterday when she’d first mentioned how young she looked. 

If Neferet brought her this far as a sacrifice, there was no way she’d have told her anything about her past. No way she wouldn’t have killed her for bringing it up. People had died for less. Somehow, she was safe. Neferet wasn’t a part of the future that hung over her head all her life. She was safer. 

And she was unguarded when she was asleep. Lynette wouldn’t have believed what she could do, seeing her with her eyes closed, in a pool of her own blood-red hair. The marks of a vampyre seemed to glide over her face, as though some delicate blue fingered hand had caressed her and left behind its traces. Her shoulders when she lay in bed were not set with the weight of her century of life. Mostly, the difference was that her eyes were closed. Her lips were nearly as venomous—they commanded her children. They set in a hard line and locked her thoughts in and Lynette out. It was with her eyes, Lynette thought, that she’d first learned to kill. She was perhaps, the closest anyone could meet to a gorgon—beautiful and petrifying. Mostly though, it was herself that could become stone. 

Right now, she wasn’t. She was made of flesh and blood, and it was another window—just as skipping stones and hearing her laugh was. These windows showed her who Neferet could have been, starkly contrasting who Lynette knew her to be. She looked away. It was somehow a violation to see the person she’d never been able to be. The woman at peace and the one that laughed were not the woman who’d hardened herself enough to kill a boy in the airport to avoid witnesses. 

Was this her when the tracker found her the night she’d mentioned, still bloody but inexplicably also made of marble? Flesh was so much more easily wounded than stone, and she’d never wanted to feel that again. She rebuilt who she was going to be out of the pain. Lynette saw that in her, in everything she had to control, and she envied that control. Before she’d watched Neferet do it, she’d wanted that ability to turn to stone, press forward, withstand, claim her own fate so strongly that she sought to become a goddess. Neferet would not cede her own will even to death. She had to be exhausted. 

She had to have been blindsided, Lynette realized, to have cried when at the loch. It was like getting hit in already bruised lungs. Before that, Lynette hadn’t thought she’d be capable of tears and seeing it felt profoundly wrong. Granted, before that, Lynette didn’t think anything could hurt her—she was close enough to a goddess that she didn’t seem to have a past—she just  _ was _ . When that illusion, Neferet's stone facade, was shattered, it hurt almost as much as talking about her own life could. Seeing this woman, this goddess cry, hearing what he’d done to her. 

Lynette wasn’t a violent person. She hoped the strangulation had been messy. She hoped her husband had been terrified and had known why he was dying and realized that Neferet was the one taking his life. She had the power. She only wished that it had helped her heal. Turning to stone left every chip, every scratch as they were. A century later, they were as immortalized as she sought to be. It should have ended there, with the fear he’d find her abated, she could stop seeing him in every shadow. Instead, in a literal way, with her children, she became the shadow. Everything was or could be a threat, and to protect herself was to become untouchable. 

For some reason, she’d set Lynette apart. She could have told her she was never young or chastised her. Instead, she heard her,  _ confessed _ to her. The solitude she kept behind her walls had to be so painful, after all those years. Every time Lynette had to rebuild, she’d alienated herself. Sometimes, at the start, she recognized herself as little as the people she used to know until she settled into whoever she thought she could be. It still felt lonely, because this version of her had forsworn getting close to anyone. Neferet had been cold, impenetrable, hard and distant—unknowable—for a century. She had to be so alone it nearly consumed her. 

The thought of all that silence was what brought Lynette to speak. “My Goddess,” she started, “you told me the day I called you my goddess would be a glorious one. I think it was,” her throat closed, the words hard to say. “It was, that day when I first said it. I swore you an oath. Loyalty, obedience and worship,” she recalled. “It wasn’t hard to give you that. You were simultaneously the most terrifying person I’d ever met, and the greatest escape from who and where I was,” she confessed. 

“The reason I asked you how you got out was that in an afternoon, I was further from any way to relapse into that life than I’d managed in decades. You brought me further from that abyss,” she admitted. She wondered if Neferet knew what she’d done for her, or if she thought of that at all before yesterday. “And you… when I look at you, I see what you had to do. I see how much you’ve lost to become a goddess. I see the cost of turning your skin to marble. Tracks from your children’s teeth, and I’ve seen the scars you don’t wear on the surface.” She bit her lip, trying not to envision her pale face, the tears spilling down her cheeks. 

“You’ve done the impossible, my Goddess. And I’m the only one who’s ever seen what that cost.” She was silent for a moment as if waiting for Neferet to wake. When she didn’t, she continued. “I’m enough like you to know the kind of strength it takes not to give into all that pain,” she lay back down, facing her. “I know how alone you were through all of it.” She set one hand very delicately atop Neferet’s. 

“You... you’ve never had anyone care for you, have you?” she asked, “You’ve never had anyone see that you’re made of marble, and if you have, you’ve never met anyone who wanted to see through you. You’ve never found anyone not so convinced of your facade to know, let alone care, what you’ve made, and what it’s like being within your bones.” And she might be wrong. Maybe Neferet took lovers that she let her guard down around when she was younger. Maybe she had a confidant who’d been killed, but it didn’t feel like she had. It felt too raw, and too shocking to both of them when she’d started talking. Perhaps, when she presented herself a goddess, people assumed she was constant, had no past. It was what she wanted.

Lynette bit her lip, “you protected yourself. All these years, you shed more and more blood, protecting yourself, so much it almost dragged you under, and I’m the only person you’ve ever shown yourself to. I…I think I know you, my Goddess, I think I might be the only one to know this part of you,” She confessed, skating around the feelings that brought to her, knowing that some part of her was enough for Neferet to drop her guard. Perhaps it was just that they were too much the same. “I don’t have a lot to give you. I can’t take you away from your abyss like you did. I can’t turn you back from stone with my eyes,” she admitted, “I can plan, and arrange, and strategize with you.” It was what she was chosen for. It fell short.

“I swore to be loyal, and I will be. I don’t know what kind of support a goddess could need from a human, but I will be here. I’ll be beside you, even if we fail so that you know, if you were capable of falling from grace, you’d have someone to fall on,” she offered. Somehow, that still felt incomplete. There was still plenty that hung, unspoken in the air. “I want to take back the century you spent alone with your demons.”

It wasn’t just that. It couldn’t just be about the pain. She didn’t feel this way about her just because they’d both been abused. “I want to see you for who you are, a woman and a goddess—one capable of magick beyond imagination, and laughter, joy and sorrow that seem just as impossible. I want that part of you to be possible, and I want to turn you back from stone without fear. I want you to be able to be who you were at the loch. Who you are when you sleep.” 

She took a breath. Somehow it felt like there was too much gravity to what she was about to say. She had to pace herself, take her time. These words didn’t feel like just words. “So I will be loyal, and whatever happens, you won’t go through this alone.” It felt like a burden off her chest to promise it to her. “I will believe in you. That’s why I’m calling you my Goddess now. And I’ll cherish you when you're real and alive—who you could have been,” she paused again. It still wasn’t all she had. “And I’ll heal you when you can’t be stone anymore, and part of you still feels a century of hurt. I’ll never lose who you are through all that stone. I will see you, what’s really you, what parts of you you never lost, and as no one’s ever tried to.”

Lynette could have left it there. “I don’t have much life to promise—I know I’ve got  _ what? 50, 60 year _ s—less time than you’ve been alive, but I need you to know that I’m yours for all of it.” She hoped that time was enough to get through. “I-I don’t know much about love. I wrote it off, same as you did. Neither of us has a reason to think it’s real. I’d always thought love was an excuse for the extremes of both depravity and stupidity,” she admitted

“Now I think love is trusting someone enough to want the parts of them that are sharp. Caring enough to see the things that never healed, and devoted enough to stand by them, and to want to, whatever happens. If I’m right, and I know what love is, then I promise you, my Goddess, that I will love you all my life.” She knew why she could call her that now—the day she thought she could love someone was a glorious day; the day Neferet was loved had to be equally precious.

She felt it. It was at first like the warmth of the fireplace, or a hot bath on a cold day, as though it seeped in through the skin. She felt as though she’d never really known what cold was—not really. This warmth somehow was her and was within her. Perhaps it wasn’t the feeling of being by the fireplace as being the fireplace, that sort of warmth. 

Perhaps this was what home was supposed to feel like. Perhaps this was love. Perhaps this was magick. Whichever it was, she felt as though in all her life, all the suffering, all the homes that were prisons, and the collapsed sanctuaries, this was where she belonged. 

_ She accepts your oath.  _


	3. Epilogue: Oath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The ramification of last night's promises.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I cried so hard while writing this, but it was happy tears. 
> 
> See ending notes for an explantation of the magic in this. It didn't feel appropriate in the text to insert in that long a blurb.

It wasn’t long before Neferet woke up. She sat up slowly, almost as if she was testing that her body still responded as she was accustomed to. For two people with so much to say to sleeping others, the silence hung heavily, a curtain between she and Lynette. She looked at her, and opened her hand, revealing the smooth, flat rock she'd held all day. What she hadn’t seen the night before was that there was a small hole worn in the centre. Neferet almost wondered if she'd carved it in the day while she slept--she didn't think she was that strong. When she opened her hand, Lynette seemed to animate beyond their mutual staring eyes. 

“It looks just like the stones we skipped,” she said, and Neferet offered it to her to inspect. She turned it around in her hand, feeling it, warm from Neferet’s hand all day. The little hole in it. It felt like it had to be more than just a piece of stone like the ones beneath their feet by night. Maybe that was why it was special--she'd never have seen it. Maybe it was special because it was warm. Neferet was somehow warm, which, despite the times they's touched, Lynette still never expected. She'd never have seen it.

“I want you to have it,” Neferet said, her first words into the silent room.

“The skipping stones?” Lynette asked, feeling some kind of rush at the contact with it. It felt somehow surreal, even if Neferet had promised her everything: the house, the retirement, the way out. Somehow, the stone she was holding she knew had to mean more. With her power and wealth, all the rest of it was an afterthought, it meant nothing to Neferet. This stone meant something if she’d held it all night.

What did that mean about Lynette, who'd been so close she'd breathed her air?

Neferet nodded, before continuing, “I want you to have the skipping stone. The laughter neither of us had,” she said, feeling as she was leaving off the most crucial element, but struggling to admit what had come so freely earlier, “and me. All of me: the parts that are dead, or at least presumed dead, the power, the protection,” she carried on, “last night I was real for the first time in more than a century. That is yours.”

Lynette could hardly process the words she was saying, her eyes filling with tears that she didn’t shed, looking down at the stone. So much had come of that moment together. Something at first place, as small as the stone. She remembered the promises she’d made the day before. She took the skipping stone, and knotted a section of cord through it, tying it with a rudimentary knot behind her neck. “I…I want that,” she said, something in her unable to slow her words, they too were skipping out into some unknown loch, and came in similar bursts and falls, “I knew last night…”

It took a moment to collect in words the things she _knew_ , “I knew last night the person I wanted. I want your sharp edges. I want the parts of you that are too far, and scare both of us, probably. I want the parts of you you didn’t know were healing, because you’d learned not to feel them, and I want the parts of you that are enduring. You have a start, but you don’t have an end, and I _do,_ but-” She was about to offer what she had. 

Neferet cut her off, “but that end won’t come. Goddess, Lynette, you’ve seen what I made myself, what I became. I want to protect you as fiercely as I have myself all these years. Death itself _cannot—will not_ reach you. I am as much a shield as a sword. I want whatever relief you can have knowing that I can and will be that to you. _It isn’t your future_ ,” she said, her voice dropping for the last words. She didn't just mean death, and that didn't escape Lynette. Taking her hands, and looking into her eyes, Lynette only began to realize how green they were. There wasn’t a hint of shadow in her eyes. This was in earnest.

She legitimately believed that Neferet was more powerful even than death. She believed her future. “My Goddess,” the words left her lips, a reverent question. _A glorious day._

Neferet smiled, “Vampyres have long had a tradition of swearing protection unto someone they loved. Usually a son of Erebus and a priestess. _The Warrior’s Oath._ It allowed someone I never loved so close to into my head it made my skin crawl. He did not survive me. I was never meant to be that Priestess. I was meant to save myself,” she seemed almost too animated, as though the words were too desperate to leave her, but Lynette wasn’t afraid. “Nyx has a warrior, after all. One that can feel her, can find her, can be healed by her,” her words slowed.

“I was a High Priestess, but I made myself in blood. I don’t know what love is. I wish I did so I could show you. The only way I know to love is with that same violence. Protection. The closest I know to love is promising so much future that one day it surpasses the past, and you know it’s over-” something Lynette knew Neferet herself didn’t even have, “and that is my Oath, as a warrior, by my own divinity and the goddess I forswore, if you’ll take it.”

Lynette had already accepted that oath, it was just now that she knew what it meant. She sealed it first with hands in hair. With a kiss. With tears of unknown origins, from pairs of eyes in tandem, impossibly synchronized. She sealed it in wild eyes full of something as dangerous as hope. “The priestess’s job is healing, right?” She asked, and Neferet nodded, silent as though she sensed there was more Lynette had to say, “then be my warrior, and I’ll be the one place you know you’re not made of stone. I believe in you, my Goddess, that you’ll protect me, that you’ll heal, and that things can be different. _We can be different_. And I believe you, that it’s love when I can touch your serpents and not be afraid, and that it’s love when you tell me death has less claim to me than you. I believe in you, like a goddess,” she trailed off.

Thumbing the stone, she added, “and I love you like the woman I skipped stones with.” 

She knew, beyond a doubt, what it meant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, Neferet actually explains the magic pretty well, but to essentially explain myself:
> 
> In canon, a Warrior's Oath is supposed to be a vampyre thing, but Darius proves that that's inessential, becasue he swears one to Aphrodite. 
> 
> It's also supposed to be an Oath that Nyx blesses, which, she and Neferet are on shaky terms, but I believe for the purpose of this fic, that she sees this will save her. Neferet swears both through her, and through "her own divinity"--if I continue this into another fic, which, honestly, I will and we know this about me--this is going to mean that, when she gains power enough, she'll be able to give enough of it to Lynette that, though she won't be truly immortal, neither will, they will share a very long life together. that's what that means. 
> 
> So yeah, that's why the oath works.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a part of my quest: I want 10 pics in the Neferet/Lynette tag by NYE, and I'm determined (even though I will end up writing all of them)


End file.
